The Empire Remains Shop

"Empire shops" were first developed in London in the 1920s to teach the British to consume foodstuffs from the colonies and overseas territories. Although none of the stores ever opened, they were intended to make previously unfamiliar produce and products—sultanas from Australia, oranges from Palestine, cloves from Zanzibar, and rum from Jamaica—available in the British Isles. The Empire Remains Shop speculates on the possibility and implications of selling back the remains of the British Empire in London today.

Based on a public installation in London in the fall of 2016, the book catalogues and develops the installation's critical program of discussions, performances, dinners, installations, and screenings hosted at 91–93 Baker Street. The pieces in this book use food to trace new geographies across the present and future of our postcolonial planet. Structured as a franchise agreement, The Empire Remains Shop lays out some of the landscapes, imaginaries, economies, and aesthetics that future iterations of the shop would need to address in order to think through political counterstructures for a better distributed, hyper-globalized world.

About the Author

Cooking Sections (Daniel Fernández Pascual & Alon Schwabe) is a London-based duo of spatial practitioners. They explore the systems that organize the world through food. Using installation, performance, and mapping, their research-based practice operates within the overlap among visual arts, architecture, and geopolitics. They have been part of the US Pavilion, 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale; residents of The Politics of Food program at Delfina Foundation; and have shown their work at venues including the Victoria and Albert Museum, dOCUMENTA(13), the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, the Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam, and the Centre for Contemporary Architecture in Montreal. They were part of the 2016 Oslo Architecture Triennale and 2016 Brussels ParckDesign, and recently completed a residency at Headlands Center for the Arts in San Francisco. They lecture internationally and lead an architecture studio at the Royal College of Art in London that investigates the financialization of the environment.